Fear Not The March of the Penguin

Is it just me or has Google turned the majority of SEOs into squeamish little namby-pambies, shaking in their boots at the mere mention of fuzzy black and white marsupials or little waddling marine birds? It’s almost embarassing to the rest of us trying to do real marketing. Certainly, the Panda and Peguin updates have been significant changes to Google’s quality algorithms, but I have to believe there’s a reason they’re not called ‘Cutts’ Revenge’ or ‘the SEOpocolypse’ update, right?

Why? Because these updates are not meant to wrack punitive damage to search marketers attempting to gain visibility for their clients the right way.

Terakeet understands the types of relationships our clients need to foster across the web and we seek out the people we need to speak with to build those. We understand the types of content that inspire people to mobilize, to share, to act, to be inspired, and we work to create that engagement. We research and cultivate the types of citations that reinforce the authority of the brands we work with and we inject our client’s core competencies into those resources.

People had been whispering about an impending crackdown on steroids in baseball since the late 1990s. In 2005, after much wrangling with the player’s union, anonymous testing, and public outcry, Major League Baseball instituted its first comprehensive testing program for performance enhancing drugs. Over the eight years since, people haven’t stopped hitting home runs, but they’ve become harder to hit for those who couldn’t pump stananzanol into their back-side. And like the juiced ball era in baseball, the “juiced link” era in search is over. Systemic controls built into the algorithm now allow for the true cream to rise to the top.

At Terakeet, we too have been listening to the whispers of search leaders for a decade. If you’re a progressive web marketer and have been listening to things Google has been saying for the past decade, these updates should neither surprise us or disrupt us from amplifying the things that make us and our clients great. This isn’t modern search engine optimization. It’s modern marketing. The confluence of the two is now just algorithmically blurred by Google and other search engines.

Since the Panda and Penguin pendulums had begun swinging in early 2011, not one of Terakeet’s clients has been negatively impacted by an algorithmic change.

None. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

While we certainly monitor this type of change, as we’re likely to benefit from the devaluation of some of our less prescient competitors, we do not fear and will never fear, the furry or the feathery.

Military campaigns are often named things like ‘Operation Sparrowhawk Strike’ or ‘Furious Lion.’ When Google starts naming their updates like that, then I’m going to be scared. But it’s clear right now that different than military campaigns, this isn’t a war on search engine optimization or marketing, it’s a battle for quality and search marketers need to embody quality rather than try to exist alongside it.